London Olympics

The Campaign for Gentlemanly Conduct; part 3.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

So now we have the Para’s – is it okay to call them the Para’s? And more genuinely stirring and even remarkable sporting stuff to satiate that proper-joy-meets-nationalist-frisson-thing. A summer of smiling madly and wondering if that’s okay? C’mon… that reading and thinking stuff is … okay… but… give it a rest! BOUNCE – bounce and clap!! TOGETHER!

For life is simple and sport is good and gold is only gold. And these Olympics – these sports – can surely be enjoyed disproportionately in the moment but returned to the real life context promptly. Contemplate later if you will the alarming inconsistencies twixt ‘glory’ and gory chauvinism/materialism midst the nose-bagging or could it be appeasement of our most bovine requirements – for fast-food highlights watchable from our Pringle-caked sofas? If you will. Afterwards. Or not – I’m a fan, me.

So either relax or have fraught moments of post-modernist angst before keeping it simple. And celebrating – continuing to celebrate – on the Brit-funded, Brit-led and spun carousel. Every day there will be a fabulous and a winning smile as our athletes respond magnificently to the world-beating support in the world-class venues. Every day somebody will talk inspiringly modestly and generously of their achievement being rooted in their team, in us. And this sits somewhere rather proudly between heart-warming and outright wonderful. If you just believe.

The thread of my Conduct posts – which I promise I am returning to – has been woven crudely around this un 21st Century wholesomeness; the nature of TeamsGB being so contingent upon, so lifted by some recognition of (dare I use the word communal?) good stuff we might call spirit. It’s something surprisingly pure, this thing – their connection with, even their reliance upon a real and conceptual us. Time after time we have seen athletes rise to the challenge, even when the pressures seem absurdly charged agin them; they’ve performed; they’ve thrived. And this is one of the key things that separates them from (for example) England footballers.

There could be a specific charge here, that Team England FC have perennially wilted when their Olympic equivalents came around. I am more interested in broader charges against the game of football – or allegedly top level football – and its indulged protagonists.

My first two posts on this subject spilt their six-pack of beery moralistic banter around dubious ‘comparisons’ between the Olympic brilliance/properpeople combo as epitomised by Katherine Grainger/Mo Farrah/Justaboutallofthem,actually and (say) Rio Ferdinand. Following that massacre, in which it was scientifically proven that too many footballers really are wankers with the sensitivity of er… oil tankers, I begin to reconstruct the football model in a Danny Boyle-like pastorale. Because diving, screaming abuse at the ref and owning 5 rolexes is well out of order, right? So.

In this anarchic tumble I will again try to key you in to football’s anti-gems – the dollops of doo in the matrix – suggestive or reflective of wider issues. If this seems obtuse, my counter would be simply that I reckon fans feel like this, in spluttering, impassioned bulletpoints. It’s personal. Stuff that gets my wick then, includes;

  • Strikers seeking only to ‘draw’ a foul, or better still a penalty whilst bearing down on goal –or, increasingly, anywhere on the goddam pitch. The traditionally burning, gurning desire of the No. 9 to smash one in the top corner now being gone.
  • Pretending to be religious whilst crossing the threshold of the park.
  • Endless and often aggressive abuse of the referee/officials.
  • Petty appealing for ‘everything’, including everything that patently isn’t ‘ours.’
  • Diving and acting and the generally associated trying to get a fellow pro (hah!) sent off.
  • Note to above; in particular the diabolical histrionics around any slight contact with the face. I’ve seen Scotty Parker – otherwise a proper throwback to good ole English terrierhood – feign acid attack to his fizzog; unforgivable. And diabolically prevalent.
  • That general crassness around money.
  • That general crassness around seemingly knowing the value of nothing.
  • Specifically on Teams England FC – even given their prevailing mediocrity – the galling lack of achievement when Big Days arrive. (And I’m not just talking about penalties.)
  • More than this, the stultifyingly dull and ungenerous manner in which England teams have performed in these major tournaments. Where they play no meaningful football; where they seem pale unbelieving shadows… barely even ticking the ‘honest triers’ box. This chronic unbelief, this inability to rise when atmospheres are at their most magnificent is surely hugely telling of their relative smallness as people as well as damning of England systems? It’s what makes fans wonder if they care… and rightly or wrongly, football fans watching our Olympians and Paralympians will and do wonder why the hell the footballers can’t lift their game like this. Sorry… did I go off on one ?

Much of this counts as a digression I know. So I will attempt to retreat to my argument over Gentlemanly Conduct.

The crassness in Premiership football combined with the Hodgson-led slink back (apparently) to philosophies 30 years plus out of date means there is a crisis in the soul of English football; a real one. It may be business as usual in the Prem but it’s a sour business. Particularly when compared to the smiley-roundedness of what we have seen on tracks, on water and generally all over this summer. Nobody believes in the players because they are mercenaries. They dive, they cheat, they lack much of what is broadly regarded to be sporting. The managers routinely offend our intelligence, either through blandly pursuing the Offer Nothing ritual that is the ‘face the cameras’ moment, or, in the case of someone like the now departed Dalglish, by being actively hostile to the notion that folks might want to know something. Something real. The presiding emotions – if any are apparent – are closer to a kind of barbarism than sport. And football is… a sport.

My Campaign for Gentlemanly Conduct is a loose and I hope likeably unthreatening but genuine call for that tumbleweed moment to turn into that lightbulb moment; for some change. Footie is so in my blood it’s not true; yet I find myself turning elsewhere, increasingly, for that daft but preciously sustaining glimpse of triumph or grace. Because too much in the game is not good enough; leading me to ask why and what might be done.

My conclusion is that a recalibration of notions of respect – and the Law of the Game around this – is necessary. This seems central to the major problems (and major turn-offs), namely the poor or disrespectful or dishonest conduct of players and managers.

It’s one of the great no-brainers of world sport that footballers must be in whatever way works re-educated in terms of their relationship with referees in particular. This will probably mean bans for abuse, fines in the modern era being sadly meaningless. Beyond this, I contend there really is a role for some panel of wise men or women who review controversial moments or incidents that in some way bring the game into disrepute. They should be empowered to penalise offenders against sportsmanship as well as the Laws of the Game.

I realise the difficulties around such a panel but see little hope for improvements unless at some stage player X is materially judged against for obvious simulation – for example. If this necessitates changes or extensions to the laws so be it; that might where that politically unsound but retrievable Ungentlemanly Conduct concept comes in.  Making things or people better.  Then 3 former players or officials in a room – job done.

Us fans feel that stuff is wrong and needs righting somehow. Having a foot in other sporting camps I can tell you that rugbyfolks and cricketers and sportsfolk generally really are offended and really do relentlessly mock the arrogance and the lack of honour (however pompous that might sound) amongst footballers. The Campaign for Gentlemanly Conduct has been (and is) about representing that amorphous groundswell-thing against crap in football. Crap behaviour, crap attitudes, crap awareness. Football… take a look at yourself.

The Campaign for Gentlemanly Conduct; part one.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ 4 Comments

The 2012 Olympics was a significant success for New Blighty in virtually every way you can think of, including and importantly because it did express some progress towards an appreciation of and national ease with our much discussed multi-culturalism. It’s surely a tad more difficult now to be casually or serially racist? Now that we’ve all seen how wonderfully part of us Mo Farrah/Jess Ennis are, how much we mean to them, even. Only the most outstandingly moronic and impervious xenophobe could bark out white supremacist garbage (or similar) in the glorious wake of such a unifying Olympics, yes?

That may be too optimistic a view. But for me a key memory, a genuinely warming one amongst the admittedly intoxicatingly gathering festival concerned how we look… and how we sound, us Brits. Tied into those abstract notions of place and belonging – notions frequently co-opted or compromised by sometimes legitimate political or cultural discourse – this goodly thing that shone back at us (proper people?) did appear to be about us; our team.

We were a hugely attractive bunch; black or mixed race or whatever. And when our athletes emerged into individual focus from their brilliant blur of TeamGBness, for their post-blow sofa-spots or trackside verbals, they were, despite their ‘diversity’ uniformly charming and generous; they were great company.

Dangerously for those of us attempting to report without lapsing pretty immediately into anglo-corn, our athletes brought back to us virtues feared lost in the age of footballer-generated smog. They really were delightful, articulate and entirely believable as decent specimens of humanity. They were compellingly appropriate if not ideal representatives for us. We therefore revelled in the sense of a shared adventure – inevitably more or less vicariously – but with a persistently humming and occasionally electrifyingly uplifting connection. Because beyond the silverware, the medals, there was a profound general awareness of extraordinary people – them – giving of their best in the knowledge of, or even motivated by, other people – us!

…Here comes that dangerous crop of hagiopoop…

Consequently us Brits were gawping and smiling at heroic effort and deserved success by athletes we were proud to think of as Our Lot – not just because of their winning but because of their winning humility, humour and palpable honesty. Time after time – you pick your own! – we were presented with beaming members of TeamGB who captivated us with their wit and their roundedness during interview. They talked with real warmth and appreciation and understanding and insight and generosity about their event… and often our place in their success. And we loved them for all that.

Okay. So deep breath and yes, remember not God Save but those other lyrics, of Declan MacManus –

No more fast buck / when they gonna learn their lesson

When we gonna stop all of these victory processions?

Maybe the world hasn’t actually been changed. A fine Olympics hasn’t, sadly, undermined the monolithic badness of Growth-worship or manifest greed. (In fact, looking at the sponsors… let’s not go there.) But maybe something in our sporting world got better? And maybe we can nudge or bundle shy or retiring loveliness a bit closer to the front of class?

Already a certain momentum against widely perceived arrogance and ludicrous over-remuneration of modest and frankly often undeserving talents in the football world has arisen. Not that many needed the Olympics to flag up the rolexization of our national game – there being even amongst the tribal and myopic some acknowledgement that players don’t give much for what they get.

So let’s just compare what we heard from Farrah and Ennis, the rowers, the cyclists (again, you name the ones who affected or inspired you the most) with what you might get from Frank Lampard/Rio Ferdinand/Kenny Dalglish. (And I reckon I’ve plumped for 3 gentlemen fairly representative of their milieu – even if one is retired.) And let’s maybe consider some vaguely equivalent post-match scenario.

There would be little chance of unaffected joy from the football side. There would be a patina of rehearsed dullness, in fact. Possibly due to some significant underachievement by a manifestly poor or disappointingly stilted England side but arising too from a widespread Premiership Quality cynicism wherein no real truths must be told and some imaginary defensive line must be held against public knowledge.

Whilst Lampard has the capacity to come across as a decent bloke, he is traditionally unwilling to break through into generous good humour; Ferdinand and Dalglish are less giving than this. Often one or both are deliberately obtuse or somewhere between absent, insultingly bland and openly hostile. There is a chronic disconnect, in short, between these legends of the game and the notion that fans might really want to know what they think of x or y. And critically, there is very rarely any suggestion that they love what they do. Or we don’t feel that.  They don’t share much.

On good days, when I feel the footie-pulse coursing through my own veins, I colour in Frank or Rio’s blandness with memories. Often though, I am spurred to join in with those ‘having a dig.’  I have to confess to having unreasonably enjoyed the diabolical freedoms being an insignificant blogger allows – I know and respect the fact that the likes of @ianherbs @_PaulHayward reign themselves in for national publication – but I can sling verbals around a bit, sound off a bit more – like you. So I can further indulge the dubious belief that our young Premiership heroes are ripe for personal as well as professional evaluation, as they are in the court of popular opinion.

When weighed up for their fitness for purpose as rounded humans, or appreciated in terms of their sensitivities, their understanding of value and yes, place, The Footballers seem embarrassingly feeble. Some might say shockingly or offensively so.

On times I am offended by their dumb scurrying through life, their brazenness. How could they allow a sport so beautiful to be so disfigured with simulation, with contempt for authority, with arrogance of such an epic quality? (For surely they are complicit in all this, if not administratively ‘responsible?’)

There is no comparison, I’m afraid, with what those cyclists give and what most bigshot footballers give. In that loose but majestically fine, tippy-tappily omniscient organ us fans call our hearts, we know something ain’t right. These people – some of these people – simply aren’t good enough. And, therefore, my friends, the Campaign for Gentlemanly Conduct will go on.

Idowu

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

On Radio Five Live there has been (maybe there still is?) an energetic, occasionally impassioned debate over Phillips Idowu. Some of it undoubtedly about his performance – his failure to qualify – in the Olympic triple jump earlier. Darren Campbell, the former sprinter turned pundit gave a spirited, sometimes spiky defence of the athlete, at one stage removing himself from the debate so as to avoid the temptation to vocalise too crudely his fury. Punchy and counter-punchy? People get like that about Phillips, it seems.

There is context and there is baggage and there is opinion here. And there is unmistakably the spectre of race. For Idowu is a black Londoner with attitude; and yes, I do appreciate that may be a remark I need to explain, or engulf with my usual distractingly sparkling psycho-cobblers.

Idowu has competed with distinction for the best part of a decade in an event which tops the dodgy knees and ankles league; the triple jump.  Where stresses on joints and limbs are unfeasibly massive due to the pace and compression at work through the 3 phases.  As well as bringing real competitive energy to the event, Idowu has brought an extra dimension –  interest.

Those particular ‘characters’ elevated through their sporting prowess to the grandest of stages find there a particular kind of expectation. (Do we not shout loudest at them or for them?) Some court that – a certain Jamaican sprinter bolts to mind – whilst some bungee-jump between an apparent need to be in, then out, of the limelight. It smacks of moodiness and sometimes of genius; and sometimes, for us the audience, it just doesn’t quite come off.

Throughout his career Phillips Idowu has displayed both a penchant for a peacock strut and a significant persecution complex. Like many people who succeed, that stuff helps to drive him, you suspect. It may not, however, endear him or them to lesser mortals on the sidelines and in Idowu’s case his profile may just be more significant than his fan base. I’m thinking in particular – though not exclusively – that Phillips epitomises much of what the Daily Mail readership fears and (actually, I’m afraid) loathes. Him being in their view a discomfiting, belligerent black presence. (Incidentally, their view stinks.)

It should be unremarkable but…he has been known to apply (why wouldn’t he, as a young bloke?) punkily provocative flashes of colour to his Sarf Landun barnet, thus further denuding his place in the hearts of the anglo-saxon, slacks-wearing classes.

In addition, either he or some pallid, six-bellied tattoo-artist has jabbed shiny metal stuff through his face in a way that some find attractive, some repellent. He maybe does also have something of the loner about him… plus that ubiquitous alpha male swagger favoured by young guys making a point about something… by how they walk. And it may or may not be relevant to this single Olympian episode but he evidently hates the GB Athletics Team Manager and this unwise emotion seems reciprocated. Oh… and he has been one of the very best triple jumpers in the world for several years.

So why the negativity?  What did he do, exactly?

If there is such a thing as a generality here – and on reflection, perhaps there are too many loaded ones, too many dangerous ones? – it seems generally true that folks have responded to Idowu’s failure with vitriol rather than calm. A bundle of tweeters or listeners to R5Live seeming weirdly pleased or even gratified that the athlete underperformed – for whatever reason. Campbell was perhaps a fair counterweight to this hostility but throughout all sides were flailing rather than balletically Jonathon-Edwardsing through a series of renegade body-movements masquerading as arguments. Perhaps the barely reined-in splatter-gun that was Campbell’s anger spoke most articulately of all. (About all of us?)

But let’s get back to the sport. An undercharged rather than visibly injured or athletically compromised Idowu failed by some distance to reach the 17.10m qualifying distance; something he went on to say he might normally “do off 8 paces.” He himself seemed on the bemused side of disappointed rather than extravagantly gobsmacked. That may have been shock but I fancy not. He hinted at the need for an operation but was clear on his lack of current or immediate pain. Meaning that his Olympic experience, or the explanation of it, was pretty much as contradictory, as flawed, as our perception of him as sub-gangsta in the hood. The thought strikes that perhaps Phillips Idowu’s relationships – with people, with instruction or necessary order, with life, with us – are often this way.

I’m very much with @barneyronay in thinking this is a shame. A shame for such a bright, individual talent to get so cruelly, disinterestedly squished. He feels sadly reduced somehow, by the fact and the manner of such a non-qualification. Previously major meets have often been hugely enriched by Idowu’s broiling presence as well as his top-draw athleticism. He has always been watchable in the way other athletes may not have been. Look – how many other world class triple-jumpers from the current generation can you name?  See.  There is some kindofa case there to be rested.

Remember this set-back is not the beginning for Phillips Idowu; surprisingly, he is much closer to elder statesman than sparky junior, despite appearances (or disappearances.) Indeed it seems that much of what has ‘gone on’ – the team communications black hole, the verbals, the antagonism – suggest immaturity on his part rather than physical or emotional confidence. So does that aura of his lack real authority? Is this another alpha male down on power? Is any of that relevant? To this performance?  And why have so many seemed so belligerent in responding to his Fall?

There may be a simple reminder here (amongst the more uncomfortable stuff around race?) that brilliance and foolishness so often do cohabit in the souls of the gifted. The percentages, the parts played out in this triple-fascinating case by psychology and by physiology we – or I – can only imagine.  Imagine and then maybe post/pontificate/tweet about; revealingly.

Meanwhile (the record shows) Phillips did fail.